Does Fund Size Erode Mutual Fund Performance? The Role of Liquidity and Organization

Does Fund Size Erode Mutual Fund Performance? The Role of Liquidity and Organization By JOSEPH CHEN, HARRISON HONG, MING HUANG, AND JEFFREY D. KUBIK* We investigate the effect of scale on performance in the active money management industry. We first document that fund returns, both before and after fees and expenses, decline with lagged fund size, even after accounting for various perfor-mance benchmarks. We then explore a number of potential explanations for this relationship. This association is most pronounced among funds that have to invest in small and illiquid stocks, suggesting that these adverse scale effects are related to liquidity. Controlling for its size, a fund’s return does not deteriorate with the size of the family that it belongs to, indicating that scale need not be bad for performance depending on how the fund is organized. Finally, using data on whether funds are solo-managed or team-managed and the composition of fund investments, we explore the idea that scale erodes fund performance because of the interaction of liquidity and organizational diseconomies. (JEL G2, G20, G23, L2, L22) The mutual fund industry plays an increas-ingly important role in the U.S. economy. Over the past two decades, mutual funds have been among the fastest growing institutions in this country. At the end of 1980, they managed less than $150 billion, but this figure had grown to over $4 trillion by the end of 1997—a number that exceeds aggregate bank deposits (Robert C. Pozen, 1998). Indeed, almost 50 percent of households today invest in mutual funds (In-vestment Company Institute, 2000). The most important and fastest-growing part of this in-dustry is funds that invest in stocks, particularly actively managed ones. The explosion of news-letters, magazines, and such rating services as Morningstar attest to the fact that investors spend significant resources in identifying man-agers with stock-picking ability. More impor-tant, actively managed funds control a sizeable * Chen: Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Hoffman Hall 701, Los Angeles, CA 90089 (e-mail: joe.chen@marshall.usc.edu); Hong: Bendheim Center for Finance, Princeton University, 26 Prospect Avenue, Princeton, NJ 08540 (e-mail: hhong@Princeton.edu); Huang: Stanford Graduate School of Business and Cheong Kong Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 (e-mail: mhuang@stanford.edu); Kubik: Department of Economics, Syracuse University, 426 Eggers Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244 (e-mail: jdkubik@maxwell.syr.edu). stake of corporate equity and play a pivotal role in the determination of stock prices (see, e.g., Mark Grinblatt et al., 1995; Paul Gompers and Andrew Metrick, 2001). In this paper, we tackle an issue that is fun-damental to understanding the role of these mu-tual funds in the economy—the economies of scale in the active money management industry. Namely, how does performance depend on the size or asset base of the fund? A better under-standing of this issue would naturally be useful for investors, especially in light of the massive inflows that have increased the mean size of funds in the recent past. At the same time, the issue of the persistence of fund performance depends crucially on the scale-ability of fund investments (see, e.g., Martin J. Gruber, 1996; Jonathan Berk and Richard C. Green, 2002). Moreover, the nature of the economies of scale in this industry may also have implications for the agency relationship between managers and investors and the optimal compensation con-tract between them (see, e.g., Keith Brown et al., 1996; Stan Becker and Greg Vaughn, 2001). Therefore, understanding the effects of fund size on fund returns is an important first step toward addressing such critical issues. While the effect of scale on performance is an important question, it has received little re-search attention to date. Some practitioners 1276 VOL. 94 NO. 5 CHEN ET AL.: DOES FUND SIZE ERODE MUTUAL FUND PERFORMANCE? 1277 point out that there are advantages to scale, such as more resources for research and lower ex-pense ratios. Others believe, however, that a large asset base erodes fund performance be-cause of trading costs associated with liquidity or price impact (see, e.g., Andre´ Perold and Robert S. Salomon, 1991; Roger Lowenstein, 1997). Whereas a small fund can easily put all of its money in its best ideas, a lack of liquidity forces a large fund to have to invest in its not-so-good ideas and take larger positions per stock than is optimal, thereby eroding perfor-mance. Using a small sample of funds from 1974 to 1984, Grinblatt and Sheridan Titman (1989) find mixed evidence that fund returns decline with fund size. Needless to say, there is no consensus on this issue. Using mutual fund data from 1962 to 1999, we begin our investigation by using cross-sectional variation to see whether performance depends on lagged fund size. Since funds may have different styles, we adjust for such heter-ogeneity by utilizing various performance benchmarks that account for the possibility that they load differently on small cap stock, value stock, and price momentum strategies. More-over, fund size may be correlated with such other fund characteristics as fund age or turn-over, and it may be these characteristics that are driving performance. Hence, we regress the var-ious adjusted returns on lagged fund size (as measured by the log of total net assets under management), and also include in the regres-sions a host of other observable fund character-istics, including turnover, age, expense ratio, total load, past-year fund inflows, and past-year returns. A number of studies warn that the re-ported returns of the smallest funds (those with less than $15 million in assets under manage-ment) might be upward biased. We exclude these funds from our baseline sample in esti-mating these regressions. The regressions indicate that a fund’s perfor-mance is inversely correlated with its lagged assets under management. For instance, using monthly gross returns (before fees and expenses are deducted), a two-standard deviation shock in the log of a fund’s total assets under man-agement this month yields anywhere from a 5.4-to 7.7-basis-point movement in next month’s fund return, depending on the performance benchmark (or about 65 to 96 basis points an- nually). The corresponding figures for net fund returns (after fees and expenses are deducted) are only slightly smaller. To put these magni-tudes into some perspective, the funds in our sample on average underperform the market portfolio by about 96 basis points after fees and expenses. From this perspective, a 65- to 96-basis-point annual spread in performance is not only statistically significant but also economi-cally important.1 Even after utilizing various performance benchmarks and controlling for other observ-able fund characteristics, there are still a num-ber of potential explanations that might be consistent with the inverse relationship between scale and fund returns. To further narrow the set of explanations, we proceed to test a direct implication of the hypothesis that fund size erodes performance because of trading costs associated with liquidity and price impact. If the “liquidity hypothesis” is true, then size ought to erode performance much more for funds that have to invest in small stocks, which tend to be illiquid. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that fund size matters much more for the returns among such funds, identified as “small cap” funds in our database, than other funds.2 Indeed, for other funds, size does not significantly affect performance. This finding strongly indicates that liquidity plays an important role in the documented diseconomies of scale. We then delve deeper into the liquidity hy-pothesis by observing that liquidity means that big funds need to find more stock ideas than small funds do, but liquidity itself may not completely explain why they cannot go about doing this, i.e., why they cannot scale. Presum-ably, a large fund can afford to hire additional managers to cover more stocks. It can thereby generate additional good ideas so that it can take 1 As we describe below, some theories suggest that the smallest funds may have inferior performance to medium-sized ones because they are being run at a suboptimally small scale. Because it is difficult to make inferences re-garding the performance of the smallest funds, we do not attempt to measure such nonlinearities here. 2 Throughout the paper, we will sometimes refer to funds with few assets under management as “small funds” and funds that, by virtue of their fund style, have to invest in small stocks as “small cap funds.” So small cap funds are not necessarily small funds. Indeed, most are actually quite large in terms of assets under management. 1278 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW DECEMBER 2004 small positions in lots of stocks as opposed to large positions in a few stocks. Indeed, the vast majority of stocks with small market capitaliza-tion are untouched by mutual funds (see, e.g., Hong, Lim, and Stein, 2000; Chen et al., 2002). So there is clearly scope for even very large funds to generate new ideas. Put another way, why can’t two small funds (directed by two different managers) merge into one large fund and still have the performance of the large one be equal to the sum of the two small ones? To see that assets under management need not be bad for the performance of a fund orga-nization, we consider the effect that the size of the fund family has on fund performance. Many funds belong to fund families (e.g., the famous Magellan fund is part of the Fidelity family of funds), which allows us to measure separately the effect of fund size and the size of the rest of the family on fund performance. Controlling for fund size, we find that the assets under manage-ment of the other funds in the family that the fund belongs to actually increase the fund’s performance. A two-standard deviation shock to the size of the other funds in the family leads to about a 4- to 6-basis-point movement in the fund’s performance the following month (or about 48- to 72-basis-points movement annu-ally) depending on the performance measure used. The effect is smaller than that of fund size on performance but is nonetheless statistically and economically significant. As we explain in detail below, the most plausible interpretation of this finding is that there are economies asso-ciated with trading commissions and lending fees at the family level. Bigger families like Fidelity are able to get better concessions on trading commissions and earn higher lending fees for the stocks held by their funds. These two findings—that fund performance declines with the fund’s own size but increases with the size of the other funds in the family— are both interesting and intuitively appealing. First, in our cross-sectional regressions, it is important to control for family size in order to find a sizeable impact of fund size on perfor-mance. The reason is that these two variables are positively correlated, and since family size is good for performance, it is important to con-trol for it to identify the negative effect of fund size. Second, the finding on family size also rules out a number of alternative hypotheses for our fund size finding. For instance, it is not likely that this finding is due to large funds not caring about returns, since large families appar-ently do make sufficient investments to main-tain performance. More important, these two findings make clear that liquidity and scale need not be bad for fund performance per se. In most families, ma-jor decisions are decentralized in that the fund managers make stock picks without substantial coordination with each other. So a family is an organization that credibly commits to letting each of its fund managers run his or her own assets. Moreover, being part of a family may economize on certain fixed costs, as explained above. Thus, if a large fund is organized like a fund family with different managers running small pots of money, then scale need not be bad per se, just as family size does not appear to be bad for family performance. Therefore, given that managers care a great deal about performance and that scale need not be bad for performance per se, why does it appear that scale erodes fund performance be-cause of liquidity? Later in this paper, we ex-plore some potential answers to this question. Whereas a small fund can be run by a single manager, a large fund naturally needs more managers, and so issues of how the decision-making process is organized become important. We conjecture that liquidity and scale affect performance because of certain organizational diseconomies. We pursue this perspective as a means to motivate additional analysis involving fund stock holdings. We want to emphasize that our analysis is exploratory and that a number of alternative interpretations, which we describe below, are possible. There are many types of organizational dis-economies that lead to different predictions on why small organizations outperform large ones.3 We conjecture that one type, known as hierarchy costs (see, e.g., Philippe Aghion and Jean Tirole, 1997; Jeremy C. Stein, 2002), may be especially relevant for mutual funds and mo-tivate our analysis by testing some predictions from Stein (2002). The basic premise is that in 3 See Patrick Bolton and David S. Scharfstein (1998) and Bengt Holmstrom and John Roberts (1998) for surveys on the boundaries of the firm that discuss such organizational diseconomies. VOL. 94 NO. 5 CHEN ET AL.: DOES FUND SIZE ERODE MUTUAL FUND PERFORMANCE? 1279 large organizations with hierarchies, the process of agents fighting for (and potentially not hav-ing) their ideas implemented will affect agents’ ex ante decisions of what ideas they want to work on. Stein (2002) argues that in the pres-ence of such hierarchy costs, small organiza-tions ought to outperform large ones at tasks that involve the processing of soft information, (i.e., information that cannot be directly verified by anyone other than the agent who produces it). If the information is soft, then agents have a harder time convincing others of their ideas and it becomes more difficult to pass this informa-tion up the organization. In the context of mutual funds, soft informa-tion most naturally corresponds to research or investment ideas related to local stocks (com-panies located near a fund headquarters) since anecdotal evidence indicates that investing in such companies requires that the fund process soft information, e.g., speaking with CEOs as opposed to simply looking at hard information like price-earnings ratios. This means that in large funds with hierarchies in which managers fight to have their ideas implemented, managers may end up expending too much research effort on quantitative measures of a company (i.e., hard information) so as to convince others to implement their ideas than they ideally would if they controlled their own smaller funds. All else equal, large funds may perform worse than small ones. Building on the work of Joshua D. Coval and Tobias J. Moskowitz (1999, 2001), we find that, consistent with Stein (2002), small funds, espe-cially those investing in small stocks, are significantly more likely than their larger coun-terparts to invest in local stocks. Moreover, they do much better at picking local stocks than large funds do.4 Another implication of Stein (2002) is that controlling for fund size, funds that are man-aged by one manager are better at tasks that 4 Stein’s analysis also suggests that large organizations need not underperform small ones when it comes to pro-cessing hard information. In the context of the mutual fund industry, only passive index funds like Vanguard are likely to rely solely on hard information. Most active mutual funds rely to a significant degree on soft information. Interest-ingly, anecdotal evidence indicates that scale is not as big an issue for passive index funds as it is for active mutual funds. involve the processing of soft information than funds managed by many managers. Consistent with Stein (2002), we find that solo-managed funds are significantly more likely than co-managed funds to invest in local stocks and to do better than co-managed funds at picking local stocks. Finally, we find that controlling for fund size, solo-managed funds outperform co-managed funds. Note that such hierarchy costs are not present at the family level precisely because the family typically agrees not to reallocate resources across funds. Indeed, different funds in a family have their own boards that deal with such issues as replacement of managers. So the manager in charge of a fund generally does not have to worry about the family taking away the fund’s resources and giving them to some other fund in the family. More generally, the idea that agents’ incentives are weaker when they do not have control over asset allocation or investment de-cisions is in the work of Sanford J. Grossman and Oliver D. Hart (1986), Hart and John Moore (1990), and Hart (1995). In sum, our paper makes a number of contri-butions. First, we carefully document that per-formance declines with fund size. Second, we establish the importance of liquidity in mediat-ing this inverse relationship. Third, we point out that the adverse effect of scale on performance need not be inevitable because we find that family size actually improves fund perfor-mance. Finally, we provide some evidence that the reason fund size and liquidity do in fact erode performance may be due to organizational diseconomies related to hierarchy costs. It is important to note, however, that our analysis into the nature of the organizational disecono-mies is exploratory and that there are other interpretations, which we discuss below. Our paper proceeds as follows. In Section I we describe the data and in Section II the per-formance benchmarks. In Section III we present our empirical findings. We explore alternative explanations in Section IV and conclude in Section V. I. Data Our primary data on mutual funds come from the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) Mutual Fund Database, which spans the 1280 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW DECEMBER 2004 years 1962 to 1999. Following many prior stud-ies, we restrict our analysis to diversified U.S. equity mutual funds by excluding from our sam-ple bond, international, and specialized sector funds.5 For a fund to be in our sample, it must report information on assets under management and monthly returns. We require also that it have at least one year of reported returns. This additional restriction is imposed because we need to form benchmark portfolios based on past fund performance.6 Finally, a mutual fund may enter the database multiple times in the same month if it has different share classes. We clean the data by eliminating such redundant observations. Table 1 reports summary statistics for our sample. In panel (A), we report the means and standard deviations for the variables of interest for each fund size quintile, for all funds, and for funds in fund size quintiles two (next to small-est) to five (largest). Edwin J. Elton et al. (2001) warn that one has to be careful in making in-ferences regarding the performance of funds that have less than $15 million in total net assets under management. They point out that there is a systematic upward bias in the reported returns among these observations. This bias is poten-tially problematic for our analysis since we are interested in the relationship between scale and performance. As we will see shortly, this cri-tique applies only to observations in fund size quintile one (smallest), since the funds in the other quintiles typically have greater than $15 million under management. Therefore, we focus our analysis on the subsample of funds in fund size quintiles two through five. It turns out that our results are robust whether or not we include the smallest funds in our analysis. We utilize 3,439 distinct funds and a total 5 More specifically, we select mutual funds in the CRSP Mutual Fund Database that have reported one of the fol-lowing investment objectives at any point. We first select mutual funds with the Investment Company Data, Inc. (ICDI) mutual fund objective of “aggressive growth,” “growth and income,” or “long-term growth.” We then add in mutual funds with the Strategic Insight mutual fund objective of “aggressive growth,” “flexible,” “growth and income,” “growth,” “income-growth,” or “small company growth.” Finally, we select mutual funds with the Wiesen-berger mutual fund objective code of “G,” “G-I,” “G-I-S,” “G-S,” “GCI,” “I-G,” “I-S-G,” “MCG,” or “SCG.” 6 We have also replicated our analysis without this re-striction. The only difference is that the sample includes more small funds, but the results are unchanged. 27,431 fund years in our analysis.7 In each month, our sample includes on average 741 funds. They have average total net assets (TNA) of $282.5 million, with a standard deviation of $925.8 million. The interesting thing to note from the standard deviation figure is that there is a substantial spread in TNA. Indeed, this be-comes transparent when we disaggregate these statistics by fund size quintiles. Those in the smallest quintile have an average TNA of only about $4.7 million, whereas the ones in the top quintile have an average TNA of over $1.1 bil-lion. The funds in fund size quintiles two through five have a slightly higher mean of $352.3 million with a standard deviation of over $1 billion. For the usual reasons related to scaling, the proxy of fund size that we will use in our analysis is the log of a fund’s TNA (LOGTNA). The statistics for this variable are reported in the row below that of TNA. Another variable of interest is LOGFAMSIZE, which is the log of one plus the cumulative TNA of the other funds in the fund’s family (i.e., the TNA of a fund’s family excluding its own TNA). In addition, the database reports a host of other fund characteristics that we utilize in our analysis. The first is fund turnover (TURN-OVER), defined as the minimum of purchases and sales over average TNA for the calendar year. The average fund turnover is 54.2 percent per year. The average fund age (AGE) is about 15.7 years. The funds in our sample have ex-pense ratios as a fraction of year-end TNA (EX-PRATIO) that average about 97 basis points per year. They charge a total load (TOTLOAD) of about 4.36 percent (as a percentage of new investments) on average. FLOW in month t is defined as the fund’s TNA in month t minus the product of the fund’s TNA at month t 2 12 with the net fund return between months t 2 12 and t, all divided by the fund’s TNA at month t 212. The funds in the sample have an average fund flow of 24.7 percent per year. These summary statistics are similar to those obtained for the subsample of funds in fund size quintiles two through five. 7 At the end of 1993, we have about 1,508 distinct funds in our sample, very close to the number reported by previ-ous studies that have used this database. Moreover, the summary statistics below are similar to those reported in these other studies as well. ... - tailieumienphi.vn